From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Mon Mar 15 2004 - 19:43:40 MST
> The short answer - I want an environment where a program is
> also data so that automatic program generation and
> manipulation is facilitated. Making a programming language
> XML-compliant pretty much guarantees this
I guess this is what Samantha questions....
The problem is that unless this XML/prog-lang mapping is done in a very
simple, manageable, compact way, it's not of any practical use...
Honestly, I think what you want is Refal.NET (which doesn't exist of
course, but would be a fun port to make. Some friends of mine have now
ported OCaML, another weird functional language, to .NET ... The port is
called Nemerle)
> IMPORTANT POINT: If I were Ben and working on Novamente, I
> would be making sure that my freezing and thawing (storage
> and retrieval) of schemas, atomspaces, etc. was available
> through XML and that Sasha 2's syntax was XML compliant.
Yes, we use XML as one option for saving/loading. However, it's very
very slow to load large XML files into Novamente, so for repeatedly
loading the same data we load it in from XML *once* and then save a
binary "net image" file, which can be loaded and reloaded much faster.
> Note to Ben: A couple of things that I would hope for but
> don't yet see in Novamente are a) ways to take recognize and
> advantage of the scale invariance of many activities through
> encapsulation
There are processes for "encapsulation" but none that specifically
address scale-invariance; I'm not sure what you mean...
>and b) a way to compile specific time-critical
> schemas from more general schemas (and the reverse, allowing
> for subsequent description of currently compiled code, like
> CIM-dynamics, WITHOUT affecting the system).
This is something that we know we need, but have not yet thought about
in detail. This would take the form of specific "graph rewriting"
algorithms acting on CombinatorTrees and CombinatorDAGs ... Comparable
to what exists inside some functional language interpreters. But this
is not a good discussion for SL4, I suppose -- too narrowly technical...
-- Ben
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